Three Generations at Carnegie Hall
By Željko Pavlović · October 29, 2026
My father, my son, and me. Weill Recital Hall, New York.
Branko Pavlovic, Zeljko, and his son Alexander, Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall.
There is a photograph from Carnegie Hall that I keep coming back to.
We are taking a bow. My father is in the middle of the stage in a white jacket, his bass-prim in his hand, arms open, smiling like the whole room was his. I am next to him with my violin. And at the piano bench, in a suit that was probably already too small for him, is my son Alex.
Three generations of my family on one stage. My father, me, and my boy.
You have to understand who my father was to understand what he was doing in that room. Branko Pavlovic played the tambura — the bass-prim, the big one that holds the bottom of the band. He played it for twenty-eight years in the Tambura Orchestra of Radio Television Sarajevo. He co-founded Sar e Roma, the band he made with his two brothers, and in Yugoslavia that band was famous the way things were famous then — records in every house, stadiums, television. He was, by most accounts, one of the finest tambura players of his generation.
He is also the reason I play the violin. My father had a broader vision for me. He wanted me to play something that could cross cultural lines, so he put a violin in my hands when I was three and pointed me at classical music. His plan worked. The violin carried me out of Sarajevo, through the war, to Belgium, to America. I have played Carnegie Hall as a soloist three times. I have played Vienna, London, the Kennedy Center.
My father never pushed his way into any of that. He watched it the way he watched everything — like it was exactly what he expected.
Then, late in his life, he came to Houston, and we started playing together. Not stadiums. Small rooms, mostly. We played Houston Baptist University — an ordinary recital stage with a red curtain, him in his chair with the bass-prim, me standing next to him. A man who had played for twenty thousand people, sitting in a school hall in Texas, playing like the room was full.
And we played Carnegie Hall.
I have thought about why those nights stay with me more than the soloist nights. When I played Carnegie Hall alone, I was proving something my father had decided forty years earlier. When I played it with him, I wasn’t proving anything. He was on my left with the instrument he mastered, my son was at the piano, and the family business was simply continuing — the same way it has continued for over two hundred years, through better rooms and worse ones.
My father is gone now. He died in Houston, in my home, and the bass-prim is quiet.
But there is a photograph. A white jacket, an open smile, a little boy at a Steinway, and a violinist in the middle who got to stand, one time, exactly where he came from and exactly where it is going.